How to Write a Script for a Television Animated Series

Video Transcript

"If you want to create a script for an animated TV show you've got to have a story. A story, a plot, a simple you know, beginning, middle and end to take your character from A to B to C. You have your main character, your protagonist put them in the situation that creates conflict. You want to do that very early on. You want something to go wrong, something to happen. You know if he's on his way to the store, something has got to stop him from getting there. And create a series of complications until you get to the end and resolve everything. This is a script from a TV show, for half hour TV show most scripts run between thirty five maybe a little bit, thirty six pages. It's roughly a minute per page of, a minute of screen time per page of script, more or less. Most half hour TV shows do run about thirty - thirty five pages. And you also have to create little breaks for, you have to remember you have to break for television commercials. Right before you get to that page break where you go into commercial, you want to create a small cliffhanger. Something that will keep an audience to come back after the commercial. Let your main character come into a situation where you know, you don't know what is going to happen and then you know fade to black. That way your audience will come back to your program after, after the commercial. You will also need to learn proper script format. Now there are many, many books written on the subject. The format being the proper indentations on the page where the, you describe action, where the character names go, where the dialogs go. And those indentations are to help the script format run to approximately a minute per page. And it also helps producers find out how many characters are they going to need in a show, or how many props and how many locations all things that come into budgeting a script."